by Jesse Karp
The face, Laura decided, like the rest of the figure, was just the idea, the concept of face. The mouth moved, but no lines ever appeared to lend support when the voice suggested anger or superiority or humor. The face, in fact, was so smooth that it had clearly never made those lines. It didn't look like a machine face programmed to move in certain prescribed ways; it just felt like it. The smoothness, the vacuity of it was more alien to Laura than the weirdest plant, the most bizarre ocean life, the most unrecognizable mineral deposits she had ever seen.
Mike, standing the farthest back, listened to Man in Suit talk about his—its—own significance, its individuality. It made him think of all the faces he had looked out on, projecting an education at, every day. Those faces stared back in uniform apathy, at best ignoring him, at worst hating him for his efforts. And those same eyes were looking at him right now, out of Man in Suit's face. Not just looking at him; looking inside him, into his head.
"What is this place?" Mal said. "Why can't people see it?"
"The outside, the shell, is something that people made a long time ago," Man in Suit said. "But your Big Black came, and fear drove the people who occupied it away, out of the city. The shell stood empty and faded, and now it is one of the forgotten places. It is in your world, but not in your minds. People can't see it anymore because it no longer has significance for anyone."
"And there are other such places," Remak said, understanding now.
"Many. You were in one before, a place in the forest that people stopped going to and so it ceased to matter, and so I claimed it. It disappeared then, and abandoned, it started to lose things that made it real: color, smell. It will cease to exist at all eventually, and the world will be that much smaller. You think that the world exists apart from your apathy, your inadvertent disdain for things, but it doesn't. They are bound together. Your minds are far more powerful than you know. Your conception destroys things even as it creates them. As evidence, witness me."
"Why did you do this to me?" Laura thrust it out like an attack, surprised that she even had the ability to speak to the face of this thing. "Why take my parents, ruin our lives? Who are we to you?"
"I didn't single you out," Man in Suit replied, the most obvious answer in the world. "I do it to hundreds of people every day, each with their own weaknesses and traumas. I slowly defile and subvert what gives them purpose, and I do not even need to force myself into their minds. They put me there. Parents like yours in particular are quite simple. Their hope hangs on the slender thread of their children. Ronald and Claire Westlake are no one at all to me. It was just their turn. Eventually, I will have done it to everyone."
Frozen, Laura didn't know what drove the spike of fear deepest into her: Man in Suit's goal or that he had so easily, so casually renewed her sense of helplessness by simply invoking her parents' names.
"That's the outside of the building," Remak said, oblivious to Laura's tragedy, needing all his precious information, "the shell, you said. What's the inside, the doors that lead so far away?"
"The inside of this place is me," said Man in Suit. "And I grow rapidly, expanding through those doorways."
Mike realized, with a cold certainty that froze his chest, that they shouldn't have come here. By coming into the building and, thus, into Man in Suit, they let him into themselves just a little bit more. Mike could even feel it, wiggling in his brain, not a voice yet, not quite, but growing so that it would soon be a shout that blotted everything else out. His eyes twitched with icy fear toward Remak.
"And where do the doorways lead?" Remak pushed on.
"To where I am already, where I am beginning to be felt the most sharply and I can grow."
"A metaphor." Remak almost laughed, and for Laura, that was perhaps the most disturbing thing she had seen yet, the weird half-smile on Remak's face in the midst of this nightmare show-and-tell. "The doorways are a metaphor of what you are, how you travel from mind to mind. But your metaphor takes solid form."
"Still," Man in Suit went on, "there are not enough to propagate myself as quickly as I would like. That is why I employ agents."
"The MCT," Mal said.
"No." Man in Suit seemed pleased to say it. "Not of my making. You made them, just as you covered the ruined ground with a giant dome that reminds you every day of the event that set you all on this path. Your 'Big Black,' the blow you could not recover from, the event that proved you are losing control of your own lives. And so you retreat into your devices, hiding from the truth. The devices, the agents that I employ—they are simply more ways that humanity does my work for me."
"Agents like my brother," Mal said.
"Yes, he was one; one of very, very many. But Thomas Jericho was beginning to find hope, being pulled away from me by the girl he loved. So I sent others to collect him. But not before he could call for help."
"Why are the packages they deliver stuffed with trash?" Mal said. "Like the ones Isabel carried."
"The packages are for the courier. It is the mission itself that matters. I give them to young people, who waver between purpose and despair. I enlist them in something secret and sinister, something that causes them to question their own actions. And their doubt tips the balance into despair, and in the end, they are mine. The packages," Man in Suit continued, "are filled with stray words of doom, images of suffering. Someone finds the packages and opens them, and then they are one step closer to me."
"Why tell us this?" Laura was through being quiet. Remak was not their spokesman. "Why tell us any of this?"
"I tell you so you understand that you have no hope," Man in Suit answered Laura. "I will answer any question you have, because by merely being honest, I will defeat you. When I first notice you, your world fractures in a small way and things break, things that are close to you or that you value in some way. That is just the stress of my regard. I am everywhere, in everything and everybody, and no one even knows it. I am the secret future of your world and your kind. I will be absolute."
"You haven't taken away my hope," Laura said.
"But I will, because I have what you want: your family and your future. You said so yourself. I can more easily take away the hope of these others, perhaps, and once their hope is gone, yours will only be a sham that you are perpetuating for yourself, because you will be all alone."
"My hope will never be a sham," she said. "I have something that's beyond you. You could never understand it or tap into its power. I have these people, and each one of us is the power of all of us, and that's how it is with everyone alive. All they need is to know, and we'll all stand together."
"Togetherness is transitory. It fractures the instant that purpose is unaligned. Your commonality and multitudes are not strength; they are weakness, because they are only number, not support. You think that once everyone knows, humanity will 'all stand together,' but even the four of you do not stand together."
Laura stiffened, and Mal tensed behind her.
"What?" Laura said, mainly to herself.
"One of you," Man in Suit said, "is a betrayer. He already killed Nikolai Brath without your knowledge."
Mal's face tightened, and his eyes burned between Remak and Mike. Mike, his expression taut with fear, stuck his finger out at Remak.
"He intends to kill me now." Man in Suit didn't let up. "Can you grasp the enormity of this? He will be committing genocide, because I am the only one of my kind. He knows that it means the four of you will be lost forever, that your families will never recover their memories of you. But he thinks that destroying this place, the 'me' that you are in, the me that is this building, will show me to the world and thus destroy me, and he intends to do it now."
Laura turned toward Remak. His gun was out, and he shifted his body to encompass the whole room in its arc. Mal, or even Mike, might have had a chance at him. They were close enough, but they couldn't see beyond their feelings. Their feelings made them hesitate. It was always, in Remak's experience, the one who could act without feeling who cou
ld act fastest.
"What the hell are you doing?" Mal said, lurching forward instinctively or intentionally. Remak straightened the gun at him, and he froze.
"How did you know?" Remak said to Man in Suit.
"In this building, you are deep inside me," Man in Suit said, "and I am deep inside you. I can see what you think, own you a little bit, even if I can not have you completely. Yet."
"You're out of bullets," Mal said.
"There was a room in the Librarian's house," Remak told him. "The room I escaped through. It had supplies, equipment. This"—he pulled his ragged shirt open to reveal an array of flat gray packs of plastic explosive strapped to his torso—"and bullets."
"And I'm sure you'd kill us, because Brath was no problem. Right, Jon?" Mal asked, but his voice was already hard, and he knew the answer.
"Mal, Brath was gone. He let that thing into him and gave up hope, and with that went the man you knew. What was left in his place would have been sent after us, because he would always be able to get to you."
"Are you going to?" Laura said. "Shoot us? Blow us to hell? Say it!" Laura nearly screamed it, and Mal took another step forward, putting himself in front of her.
"I'm sorry," Remak said, and maybe he was. "Get out now, fast. None of you have to die."
"He's gone!" Mike shouted, and all their eyes snapped over just long enough to see that Man in Suit had disappeared.
"Was that door there before?" Laura asked.
The door she was referring to sat at the far end of the room from the elevator door.
"Go after him," Mal said to Laura.
Laura's eyes flashed to Remak and to the back of Mal's powerful shoulders and to the door.
"You have to go after him," Mal said.
"But"—Laura's voice was small, weak—"if Remak can destroy the building or something, then Tommy—"
"Go!" Mal's voice, usually so controlled, hit all of them like a pistol shot. "I'll take care of us. You save Tommy."
Laura's eyes blurred. She yearned for an authority figure to make this hideous choice for her.
"Don't," Remak said.
Her eyes fell on Remak. Then, decided, she turned and grabbed Mike's hand and pulled him to the door.
Mal stepped between them, intercepting the line of the gun. If Remak moved himself, swung the gun away, Mal could close the distance.
"Uuuuuh," the syllable of uncertainty stretched out of Mike's mouth. His mind was a thunderstorm now. Something was in there with him. He had let it in, with his fear maybe, or simply by coming in here, because he was the weakest of the four of them. Nevertheless, he was pulled to the door, and Laura yanked it open and threw them both into the darkness on the other side.
THE WORTHY LIFE
BEYOND THE DOOR was a vast hall filled with ruined instrumentation, unidentifiable, like the components of some immense, secret mechanism. Man in Suit stood at its end, facing them.
"Christ," Mike said to Man in Suit, striding past Laura, who had stopped dead upon going through the doorway. "I am so goddamned sick of you." He leaned down as he walked and hefted a jagged metal bar from the forgotten and useless hunks of machinery that were the inner workings of Man in Suit's ravaged world.
"You are not up to this confrontation," Man in Suit said. "I assure you."
"Mm-hmm," Mike said, and whipped him across the face with the bar.
Man in Suit's head snapped around, and he turned back with wide eyes, thunderstruck. Mike went at him again, bloodying him this time. Man in Suit's arm rose weakly to fend off the next blow, but fell away as Mike battered it down.
Mike lit into Man in Suit with blow after blow, cracking bones and separating muscle as he did. Mal and Remak made it in to see Man in Suit torn and open on the filthy, jagged floor.
"Whoa," Mal said. "Look at that."
Remak stared in stark admiration.
Mike looked down at the little black things squirming feebly from Man in Suit's wounds and flopping wetly onto the dirty floor to die. He continued with the pipe until there was only a smear of red and black, feeling an unburdening in his head that he had never known before. Turning around, he could see from the approval in their faces that the others felt it, too. They stood a little taller; their eyes were a little brighter.
"That was...' Mal began, unable to find the right word to end on.
"Astonishing," Remak said. "I think you just saved"—he considered for a moment and shrugged—"everyone."
Laura was staring at him, too, something beyond simple awe in her slightly parted lips.
Who'd have figured? Mike thought, looking down at the smear. All you had to do was beat him up.
They walked out of the building to find people in the street staring at it, somehow aware of the thing that had finally left their private thoughts and given them back a sense of promise.
Mal and Laura stepped aside, knowing who these people needed to see. Remak hung back, watching the people approaching Mike, not crowding him, not crushing him with their praise, but silently coming forward and touching him gently, as they might a messiah. What he had done for them was beyond mere words.
A television crew had made it here already, perhaps having been called to the scene when the building had appeared. They accosted Remak, who began a lengthy explanation. Mike saw reporters talking to Mal and Laura as well. But they couldn't reach him yet, surrounded as he was, and he was glad. These people needed him too much. He heard his three companions saying his name, though—saying it an awful lot. And it was the first time that he'd heard the Boothe name, his grandfather the war hero's name, and it didn't echo in his own ears like a taunt.
Exhausted and energized at the same time, Laura suggested that she and Mike slip away. She was understandably anxious to find her family and make them whole again, but there was something she desperately wanted to do with him first. But, heck, she was just a kid. Mike let her down easy, and when he had, she seemed even more in awe of him.
It took Mike about a month to drop twenty, twenty-five pounds, get into fighting shape. Mal offered to help, but as soon as Mike got into a gym it came easily and naturally, now that there wasn't something black in his head holding him back anymore.
He did a lot of television talk shows, because people needed to understand not just what had happened but who Mike was and what sort of a man was capable of doing what he had done. When he walked down the street, people would come up and thank him quietly.
"What you did was so important," they would say. "So important."
They were talking to him about running for office, like mayor, maybe—start small—when one of the five models he was seeing on a regular basis told him she was pregnant with his child.
It was an unhappy shock to begin with. He'd never had kind thoughts for his own parents and thus never thought much of being one. But this wasn't just a matter of having a child. In a sense, this was something for the entire world.
After nine months of running out for ice cream and pickles at all hours, the hero and the supermodel were in the delivery room. The mom-to-be was gasping away, and Mike watched the doctor gently lift a tiny little boy from between her legs.
"It's a boy," the doctor said. Nurses whisked the boy off to a small padded table, where they attended to him carefully. The mother was holding Mike's hand tightly when one of the nurses came over and whispered something to the doctor.
The doctor went over and examined the baby briefly.
"What's wrong?" the mother said.
The doctor looked at her, hesitated, looked at Mike, and made a decision. He stepped to the side, giving the parents a clear view of their baby boy.
"Oh, God," the mother choked out, ripping her eyes away from the child and snatching her hand from Mike's.
"What?" Mike said, stepping closer to look at his boy. "What's wrong?" He couldn't see anything wrong. The boy wasn't even crying, just looking back up at his father thoughtfully.
"I'm afraid your son is..."The doctor breathed in, held it a
moment, and let go. "I'm afraid your son is completely worthless."
Mike looked from the doctor to the nurses. They nodded back sadly.
"He's never going to amount to anything at all," the doctor said, shaking his head regretfully and making an irrevocable notation on his clipboard. "Completely worthless."
It was too much for the mother. She insisted on blood tests, knowing that she and her family were all accomplished, decent, and smashingly attractive, which made them incontrovertibly worthwhile people.
They rushed the results through, and sure enough, it had been passed down from Mike's side.
"Why didn't you tell us, Mr. Boothe?" the doctor asked reasonably. "After all this fuss, why didn't you come clean that you were utterly worthless in every way?"
People seemed to know all about it without even being told. They scowled at him on the street now, punishing him for his deception.
After all he had done for them. He could barely even bring himself to be angry at them after a while. In the end, you couldn't hide from your own shortcomings. Whether you saved every human being on the planet or not, worthless was worthless, and the only thing you could really do was just give in to it.
FIGHTING THE NUMBERS
"I THINK IF YOU HAD any bullets left, you'd have fired already," Mal said, and he was certainly right. It wouldn't have been a shot in the arm or leg, either. Someone of Mal's stubborn resilience would still be able to make trouble, even with a grievous leg wound, perhaps even with a shattered kneecap.
"Are you sure, Mal?" Remak's face was deader than usual, like a warning set in stone. "Better be sure."
Mal was not sure. He seemed to be figuring on what chance he had of beating Remak hand to hand with a bullet in him. Remak, betting his final chip, cocked the hammer.
